Lauren Groff interviewed over at Full Stop about her novel Arcadia, which was a Millions Staff Pick in April.
It’s the opposite of a happy ending fairy tale. It’s just hell.
Tuesday New Release Day
New this week: Gary Shteyngart’s much buzzed about Super Sad True Love Story, Rick Moody’s The Four Fingers of Death (another literary dystopia), and a new Roberto Bolaño collection, The Return. Bonus for GN’R fans: GN’R drummer Steven Adler’s tell-all memoir My Appetite for Destruction: Sex, and Drugs, and Guns N’ Roses.
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Well-Behaved Women Sometimes Make History
“When the corrective to women’s exclusion from history is to find a few suitable individuals to pluck out of the messy rush of life and achievement, and hold up for admiration, we forget that many of women’s most important historical achievements…have been the product of collaboration, community, and collective action.” For Slate, Joanna Scutts writes about recent spate of historical books about rebellious, misbehaved women, and who is left out of those stories. From our archives: a list of vile women in fiction.
Shop Talk
There’s an old story that states that Marcel Proust met James Joyce for five unremarkable minutes at a dinner party. Artistically significant though it may have been, it had less geopolitical significance than another famous meeting a hundred years earlier, in which Napoleon went out of his way to pay a visit to Goethe. As a new biography of the French emperor details, Napoleon couldn’t understand why Goethe admired Shakespeare.
Celebrity Memoir Overdose
John Harris at Guardian looks at what reading 11 celebrity memoirs in four days will do to your brain.
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Tuesday, New Release Day
Don DeLillo’s slim new volume Point Omega is out. The Wall Street Journal recently published a piece on DeLillo that explains how the movie Psycho helped inspire the book. Also new this week is Louise Erdrich’s new novel Shadow Tag